Penny, possible chapter to a book
by Girl with too much to say
Summary: This could possibly be a chapter in a book I want to write. It is sort of open ended...


When I stepped through the doors to the apartment complex, the Doorman glanced my way. He gave a brief nod and tipped his hat. He was very tall, and wears a suit of crushed velvet, which I find to be slightly odd and more than a little pretentious. Who the hell wears crushed velvet, anyhow?

I nod back to him. He smiles, or rather, he purses his lips together in such a way that my optimistic self turns it into a smile rather than a grimace. I must look a mess. This old jacket I'm wearing, it belonged to my older brother, and it's marked with tea-stains and cigarette burns and missing buttons. It used to be a chocolate brown, all sophisticated-like, but now it's dirt-colored and gives the distinct impression of my having just walked in from rolling around like some mongrel in a park. My tee shirt is faded and rumpled. There's a tear in my jeans, just below the knee, from getting snagged on a nail on my neice's bed. And I won't even get started about my Converse, but everybody knows those things aren't supposed to look new anyway.

I give the Doorman another nod, then head towards the elevator. I've been through this process a hundred times or more, walking inside, nodding to the crushed velvet man, thinking only of my destination on the seventh floor. I turn the corner, towards the elevators, and am met by closed doors and a hand-written sign that says "Out of Order. Please Use Stairs."

How do I always forget that?

So I have to turn around, go for the stairs instead, and sort of half-walk, half-trot up each step, counting the whole way. Somewhere around forty, I trip, stumble, catch myself, lose whatever number I was at, then start over. I reach the seventh floor, a stitch in my side, and curse myself for smoking. I'll quit soon, I say to anyone who's naive enough to listen. I'll quit soon, I promise. I promise.

Down the hall. Turn the corner. Third door on the left. I opened the door and walk inside.

They're supposed to be loft apartments, sold to artists or actors or writers who desire big spaces, even if they have nothing to fill that space with. Penny is an artist, and she managed to scrape together enough decoration without spending much money at all. The walls, high and concrete and bare the first day we arrived (they brought this look of disgust to my face that made Penny toss back her head and laugh). Now, the place screams of her. There are doodles all over the walls, each page touching, creating this gigantic mural of interconnected pictures that look like they wouldn't go together at all.

Here, a sketch of Abraham Lincoln, attached to a drawing of two fish sitting in a frying pan, over a fire. Above the fish, a four-page affair detailing a flying monkey from the Wizard of Oz, complete with little vest and fez. There are skeletons, puppies, kittens, landscapes, seascapes, skyscapes, dreamscapes. A furiously-drawn doodle of Jesus giving a thumbs-up to a hanged Sadaam Hussein. Several pages that were merely scribbled upon to test the color of a new crayon or pencil or pastel or paint. None of it makes sense alone, but for whatever reason, all together the random things are no longer random.

Hanging from the ceiling by dental floss that, when accumulated, might be the length of a football field, are more "decorations." CDs, mostly the free AOL discs you get at Best Buy. Paper lanterns made from candy wrappers. Origami swans, shaped in a V, pointing north, as if the inside of this place is eternally summertime. There are a few feathers, a singular (unused) tampon, broken crayons, an old casette tape whose innards sway in the breeze (the windows are always open), and a dollar bill that was scribbled on with a permanent marker. It simply said: "I never want to see you again." Penny said she had kept it because she thought that nobody should have that knowledge, that it was better to be left in the dark about those sorts of things.

Around the windows were bunches of dried flowers, hanging upside-down, their yellowing stems pointing upwards to the ceiling. Every time Penny got flowers, which was almost every day since she would often stop and pick some from the park herself, she would hang them up to dry out so that they might stay forever a decorative piece, because if she didn't dry them then they would wilt and die, and, according to Penny, the saddest thing on the planet was the smell of dying flowers.

I would disagree. I thought there were much sadder things than dead plants.

The loft was really three rooms: the living room-slash-kitchen, the smallish bathroom with no windows, and the bedroom. Penny really did live like a starving artist, which she was, for the most part. The refrigerator had only condiments and no real food, save a can of Vienna sausage from God only knew how many years back. Penny's "bed" was only a queen-sized mattress lying in the floor, a mattress that had once belonged to her grandmother. As a joke, Penny had drawn a headboard on the wall by the bed (she had long ago given up on the idea of getting her security deposit back). There were tallymarks in one corner, tiny symbols of each time we'd made love.

Penny's definition of "making love" wasn't the same as "having sex," and claimed that love could be made any number of ways, so the amount of tally marks was always different each time I dropped by. Seemingly at random, while she and I were together, Penny would hold up her hands, say to me, "Hold that thought," and fish around for a crayon, then run into the bedroom and make another tally. Upon her return, I would ask for an explanation, but she would only smile brilliantly and say, "You made love to me."

Now, however, there was something different about the apartment. I couldn't tell what. I looked around the living room for several moments, trying to discern its apparent wrongness. I looked up at the strung-up decorations, still and silent, then realized with a jolt that they shouldn't be still at all. I looked at the window. It was shut.

I walked to it, frowning, and felt something tingling in the back of my nose, some smell that I knew I should have recognized but that wasn't coming to me. I pulled the window open, felt the hot rush of air blow my hair out of my face, and inhaled deeply. I reached into my pocket for a cigarette.

Penny wasn't home. I knew she wasn't, I knew that since it was Tuesday and it was three o'clock in the afternoon, she'd be working. I wasn't supposed to be here, really, if I'd thought about it; she and I had had a fight. There had been a lot of yelling, something that seemed to explode from the both of us after months of bottled up anger and frustration at each other. Maybe not so much at each other as at ourselves, for not being able to explain WHY we were so frustrated. She told me not to call, not to write, not to come by. She told me she was finished, that she was done. She told me every thing that I couldn't have possibly stood to hear, and then she delivered the coup de grace with such ferocity that I was left speechless. I won't repeat it. It's the sort of thing that people shouldn't hear.

But I felt that if I saw her, if I could hold her in my arms, if I could just explain what I'd meant by everything I said, then it would make everything okay. If I could just say, "I love you, I love you, I love you" over and over until it pierced her skull and lodged itself into her brain, then maybe it could be fixed.

I lit the cigarette and leaned out the window. I didn't want the smoke accumulating up in the apartment; Penny hated that. She hated that I smoked, too. She hated the smell and the taste and all of it, but I couldn't really help it. It was an addiction.

She was, too.

Hours passed. I smoked an entire box of cigarettes that had been brand-new, save for one cigarette I'd had on the walk to the apartments, when I had passed the grimacing Doorman downstairs.

Five o'clock.

Six o'clock.

I walked to the bathroom, reached for the handle and tried to turn it, but it was locked. I frowned, jerked on the door, but nothing happened. It was shut tight. "Penny?" I said, but no answer.

Hadn't she said something about the door sticking?

I walked back to the window, and again that odd smell filled my nostrils. It made some part of me sick, and I reached for my cigarettes once more, but they were gone. Where the hell was she?

At seven, I said screw it. That smell, that weird coppery sort of smell, was overwhelming me, and I finally decided that she must have gone to Alice's or maybe her mom's. So I left the apartment, shuddering as I exited the door, feeling as though that smell was clinging to me even now. I went back down the stairs, counting all the way up to seventy-eight.

I walked through the foyer, glanced over at the Doorman. He nodded, tipped his hat. I nodded back. He smiled-grimaced.

Then he spoke.

"You'll never see her again, son," he said.

I stopped and stared at him. "What?"

He nodded towards the elevator. "They're taking it out. The elevator. Breaks down too much."

"Oh," I said. "Oh, I'm sorry, I thought you meant...yeah. Elevator. That sucks."

"Have a good night," he said.

"Yeah," I said, and shuddered again. I could now taste the copper in the back of my throat. "Yeah, you too."

I walked out to the street, turning up my jacket against the cold.


End file.
